Edouard Martinet

Twelve years ago, a successful French graphic designer called Edouard Martinet hadhis Damascene moment. He became severely bugged, by bugs – but not for the firsttime. He was 10 when one of his primary school teachers began to teach his pupilsabout insects, and in a rather obsessive way.

Having studied at L’Ecole Supérieure des Arts Graphiques in Paris, he lived andworked as a graphic designer in Paris from 1988 to 1992. Predictably, he found workin publishing, and in advertising and trademark logo design. But after little more thana year, he knew he was only marking time. The desire to create sculptures whichlinked the precision of graphic design with his instinct for rearranging detritusbecame too strong to ignore. “I like giving life to found objects,” he says, “and I don’twant to make them useful. I only want them to seem alive, but not as if they couldbe functional robots. I want the sculptures to give the impression, for example, thata bird is about to fly, a grasshopper is about to hop. In a word – life!”

We encounter fishes made largely with kitchen spatulas, spoons, and trumpet parts;a crayfish made with tool-parts; the swift ( in french a martinet !) with dark gleamingsteam punk wing ; a weevil with bike-chain feelers; and a praying mantis of suchcomplex delicacy that its individual parts defy recognition. Martinet has a “hugestorage” of material, cast-off bits and pieces whose shapes appeal to him. “And Idon’t always know what I am going to do with them. I use any sorts of bits. Bikeparts, utensils, radio parts, car and moped parts, car lights, umbrella ribs, sunglasses.I find them everywhere – boot sales, brocantes, garages, everywhere you can findused objects.” Almost anything can be of use. The strangest? “Ski-boot fastenersfrom the 1950s, which I found in a brocante in the Dordogne. For some pieces, Ihave to wait months. I had to wait 15 years to complete the first dragonfly. “Edouard Martinet works mainly at night and his fabrication process requiresrelatively few tools – essentially a drilling machine, grindstone, pliers, screwdrivers –because he uses parts that will fit together naturally, only ever screwing piece topiece. And he keeps them in their true found state, which could be almost new, wellworn,or even rusted. If he has the right parts to fit his vision for a sculpture, itsmaking will take about a month. “The most difficult thing is to find the right part, theone that will seem obvious – as if it had been manufactured specially for thesculpture.”

It is, perhaps, something like patience and tact that gives Edouard Martinet’ssculptures their fundamental value in terms of form: he certainly knows how to takeostensibly conflicting bits and pieces and sculpt them into something that isfiguratively refined, yet also full of surprising inflections of fact. This, ultimately, iswhere the true resonance of his art lies. His sculptures force a re-imagining of theobvious in which a meticulously finished object glows not only with perfection, butwith character and beauty.